Moira looked up. Mahogany curls escaping from a pencil stuck through a loose knot, glasses slightly crooked, cardigan sleeves pushed to her elbows and ink on both hands.
"Isla." She blinked. "Is everything alright?"
"I need your help with something." Isla held out the note. "I found this at my door."
Moira took it and read. Her face didn't change but her hands went still.
"Sit down," she said.
Isla sat in the chair across from the worktable. Moira read the note again, then set it flat on the table between them and adjusted her glasses.
"September 14th," Moira said. "What happened?"
"My father died."
Moira looked at her over the top of her frames. "On a dock."
"You knew that part?"
"Twyla mentioned it once. No details." She touched the note with one finger. "The tree line. That's specific."
"Very."
"And the number of vessels is wrong."
Isla stared at her. "How do you know that?"
Moira stood, crossed to a filing cabinet against the far wall, and pulled the third drawer. She rifled through tabs and extracted a folder, slim, maybe ten pages. She brought it back and opened it.
"When you applied to stay in Hollow Oak, the Council asked me to pull what I could from the public fae-weather archive. Standard procedure for anyone with active magical ability. I found coastal incident reports, harbor filings, two newspaper accounts." She spread the pages across the table."The Ardenmere loss is documented as two fishing vessels, not three. Crew of eleven total. Weather anomaly cited as cause, no charges filed, no named suspects."
"That's the official version."
"And the unofficial version involves a seventeen-year-old girl and a tree line."
"Yes."
Moira sat back. "This note gets the date right, gets the location right, gets the age right, and gets the vessel count deliberately wrong."
"Deliberately?"
"If someone had access to the same records I pulled, they'd know it was two. Getting it wrong by one is either carelessness or a test."
"A test of what?"
"Of whether you'll correct it." Moira pulled her glasses off and cleaned them on her cardigan. "If you respond to whoever left this — if you go to them and say it was two, not three — you've confirmed your identity and your presence."
The archive room was quiet except for the low hiss of the oil lamps and the faint sound of Lucien moving around in the front of the shop. Isla looked at the pages Moira had spread across the table. Harbor filings with stamps and dates, a newspaper clipping with a photograph of the Ardenmere waterfront the morning after, two paragraphs of text she couldn't read from this angle.
"Who has access to these records?" Isla asked.
"Anyone with a reason to visit the coastal municipal archive. They're public filings." Moira put her glasses back on. "But pulling them together by knowing to look for fae-weather specifically, and cross-referencing the incident date with harbor logs, tracing the trail from Ardenmere to here… that's not casual research. That's someone who went looking for a stormcaller."
"Not just any stormcaller."
"No. You specifically." Moira folded her hands on the table. "Isla, the fae-weather archive is maintained by three institutions. The Coastal Records Office, the Fae Historical Society in Dunmore, and a private collection held by a trading consortium on the north channel. The first two are academic. The third is commercial."
"A trading consortium."
